Dev news : latest Realaccurate designs

I’ve been working a fair bit on Realaccurate lately, improving stuff here and there, fixing broken things, streamlining workflows. Here’s a brief summary.

• I added basalt, and worked hard on getting it straight with regards to POM. It’s not perfect because POM is inherently inaccurate (and tiling side textures with top textures when they both use POM is pretty much impossible without tessellation and displacement, and even then there can be seams), but it’s looking pretty good in game. I’ll possibly look into further ways to improve this one.
  Here are some screenshots (Kappa v3.0) and a render (Substance)

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• I also added a first iteration of the podzol block. It’s currently too “high frequency” so I will have to adjust the balance between various elements. As a rule of thumb, I want Realaccurate to use low-frequency details to get that Vanilla aspect, with high-frequency details that don’t contribute much to the overall pattern. I tend to avoid medium frequency elements as they might interfere with the perception of the block. Podzol right now has too much of that, but I keep it for the time being because it looks good. I won’t change it much, but I will simply adjust the balance between high-freq and low-freq details later down the road.

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• Next block I would like to share is the chain block. This one is tricky because no shader can make use of POM on this one. It’s basically a small atlas with stencil transparency. If I wanted depth in the chain links, I’d have to use a custom model and forego rounded links altogether. For now I didn’t want that and decided to use flat textures and rounded edges.

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• Another new block is a glazed terracotta variant. I added the cyan glazed terracotta block to Realaccurate using the same technique I used for previous glazed blocks.

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• Lastly, I started tinkering with Blender because I wanted to use another way to generate more complex items like tools on smithing/crafting tables and whatnot. Substance is great when it comes to designing natural (or even man-made) patterns and materials, with some amount of repeatability and randomness. When it comes to very specific shapes for different objects and items, it’s still very powerful but lacks some visibility and spatial awareness. I wanted to try my hands at Blender to see if I could design that kind of elements in 3D instead of using 2D nodes and proc gen. I though the sculpting features of Blender could really give a more true-to-life or believeable approach to items design.
  So I used the smithing table as a test bed, and started designing its tools with Blender (hammer and pliers). Here are the results so far.

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So here it is. It’s been a busy month for Realaccurate so far. I am making good progress along with the release of new and updated versions for Vanillaccurate RTX, now Minecraft Bedrock 1.16.200 left beta and is officially live.

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